With continuing use of wide-area networks such as the Internet, the proliferation of malware is an ongoing concern. For example, websites or P2P hosts either deliberately or unwittingly host malware, and clients who download content from these sources may, in turn, become affected by the malware.
In response to this ongoing concern, various anti-malware components have become available to those who use the Internet. For example, software packages may detect incoming viruses and remove them before the viruses may cause any damage, or may clean any damage caused by previous viruses. Also, scanners for detecting and removing spyware from computers or servers are also available.
While the foregoing products may be effective for their intended purposes, opportunities for improvement nevertheless exist. In but one possible example, a plurality of computers may be deployed within a corporate enterprise, with the deployment being administered uniformly. While it may be possible to install the anti-virus and other similar software on these different computers, if a first one of these computers discovers malware on a given host, conventional techniques may not prevent other computers within the deployment from accessing the same host afterwards.